Apple has long been accused of neglecting its Pro apps and not giving them enough updates, particularly Final Cut Pro, whose biggest competitors are DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro, both of which regularly receive a bunch of new features. It looks like for now, the wait is over, because with the release of Final Cut Pro 11 (yes, we’re skipping 10.9!), Apple is actually leapfrogging the other NLEs in one area in particular: automatic masking with their Magnetic Mask feature. I took a closer look and tried it out. If you’ve been using image processing apps for a while, you will be well accustomed to Photoshop’s famous Magic Wand tool. It selects areas in an image with a similar color, and you can set it to be more or less “tolerant” towards similar colors. It’s not AI or machine learning based as it’s been around for much longer than we’ve known what “machine learning” even means, so it’s doing a pretty poor job at recognizing the borders of subjects – basically, it simply doesn’t “know” what a subject is, it only looks at similar color information. Photoshop’s Magic Wand vs. “Select and Mask” Chances are that you haven’t used the Magic Wand in Photoshop nearly as much as you used to, because of the “Select and Mask” tool that was introduced a while ago, which does a much better job at “understanding” the exact borders of objects, humans or animals. Very often it’s a one-click type of work, you click...
Published By: CineD - Thursday, 14 November